I can't understand how there can be differences in digital cables. As I understand it, in an optical cable, the S/PDIF reciever is looking for a change in state between bright and dim, not bright and dim themselves, but the transition. I suppose a sub-par cable would make this job difficult and it may miss a state change or two. Not too much though or you'd lose synch with the stream and get a dropout.
As these signals form part of a PCM digital code, I fail to understand how missing the occasional transition could have a consistent, continuous audible effect. Any audible effect would have to be specifically written as part of the PCM code. You'd actually have to purposefully encode brightness or detail or specifically remove it from the signal at the originating S/PDIF transciever. Again, you may miss a transition or two, which I suppose could affect sound, but not too many or you lose the stream. How the cable affects jitter I'm not sure, but jitter is quite a small effect, and as bad as it is, I've never heard anyone accurately describe it. About the best I have ever read is that it "affects airiness and spaciousness". Pretty difficult for a universal agreement given each person's hearing and equipment... Optical engineers in the telecommunications industry must be laughing at the audiophile community. They are concerned with data rates in the Gbps range over many miles, and audiophiles are worried about 1.5 Mbps signals over a few feet. I'm not much of an analog cable difference believer either, but at least there, there's stuff you can pick up (EMI) and effects which will be directly reproduced at the speakers. -- Mark Lanctot ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mark Lanctot's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2071 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=29353 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
